Researchers are starting to use altmetrics to understand and promote their academic contributions. At the same time, administrators and funders are exploring them to evaluate researchers’ impact.

In light of these changes, how can you, as a librarian, stay relevant by supporting their fast-changing altmetrics needs?

In this post, we’ll give you four ways to stay relevant: staying up-to-date with the latest altmetrics research, experimenting with altmetrics tools, engaging in early altmetrics education and outreach, and defining what altmetrics mean to you as a librarian.

1. Know the literature

Faculty won’t come to you for help navigating the altmetrics landscape if they can tell you don’t know the area very well, will they?

To get familiar with discussions around altmetrics, start with the recent SPARC report on article-level metrics, this excellent overview that appeared in Serials Review (paywall), and the recent ASIS&T Bulletin special issue on altmetrics.

Then, check out this list of “17 Essential Altmetrics Resources” aimed at librarians, this recent article on collection development and altmetrics from Against the Grain, and presentations from Heather and Stacy on why it’s important for librarians to be involved in altmetrics discussions on their campuses.

There’s also a growing body of peer-reviewed research on altmetrics. One important concept from this literature is the idea of “impact flavors”–a way to understand distinctive patterns in the impacts of scholarly products.

For example, an article featured in mainstream media stories, blogged about, and downloaded by the public has a very different flavor of impact than a dataset heavily saved and discussed by scholars, which is in turn different from software that’s highly cited in research papers. Altmetrics can help researchers, funders, and administrators optimize for the mix of flavors that best fits their particular goals.

There’s also been a lot of studies on correlations (or lack thereof) between altmetrics and traditional citations. Some have shown that selected altmetrics sources (Mendeley in particular) are significantly correlated with citations (1, 2, 3), while other sources, like Facebook bookmarks, have only slight correlations with citations. These studies show that different types of altmetrics are capturing different types of impact, beyond just scholarly impact.

Other early touchstones include studies exploring the predictive potential of altmetrics, growing adoption of social media tools that inform altmetrics, and insights from article readership patterns.

But these are far from only studies to be aware of! Stay abreast of new research by reading through the PLOS Altmetrics Collection, joining the Altmetrics Mendeley group and following the #altmetrics hashtag on Twitter.

2. Know the tools

There are now several tools that allow scholars to collect and share the broad impact of their research portfolios.

In the same way a you’d experiment with new features added to Web of Science, you can play around with altmetrics tools and add them to your bibliographic instruction repertoire (more on that in the following section). Familiarity will enable you to do easy demonstrations, discuss strengths and weaknesses, contribute to product development, and serve as a resource for campus scholars and administration.

Here are some of the most popular altmetrics tools:

Impactstory

If you’re reading this post, chances are that you’re already familiar with Impactstory, a nonprofit Web application supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and NSF.

If you’re a newcomer, here’s the scoop: scholars create a free Impactstory profile and then upload their articles, datasets, software, and other products using Google Scholar, ORCID, or lists of permanent identifiers like DOIs, PubMed IDs, and so on. Impactstory then gathers and reports altmetrics and traditional citations for each product. As shown above, metrics are displayed as percentiles relative to similar products. Profile data can be exported for further analysis, and users can receive alerts about new impacts.

Impactstory is built on open-source code, offers open data, and is free to use. Our robust community of users helps us think up new features and prioritize development via our Feedback forum; once you’re familiar with our site, we encourage you to sign up and start contributing, too!

PlumX

PlumX is another web application that displays metrics for a wide range of scholarly outputs. The metrics can be viewed and analyzed at any user-defined level, including at the researcher, department, institution, journal, grant, and research topic levels. PlumX reports some metrics that are unique from other altmetrics services, like WorldCat holdings and downloads and pageviews from some publishers, institutional repositories, and EBSCO databases. PlumX is developed and marketed by Plum Analytics, an EBSCO company.

The service is available via a subscription. Individuals who are curious can experiment with the free demo version.

Altmetric

The third tool that librarians should know about is Altmetric.com. Originally developed to provide altmetrics for publishers, the tool primarily tracks journal articles and ArXiv.org preprints. In recent years, the service has expanded to include a subscription-based institutional edition, aimed at university administrators.

Altmetric.com offers unique features, including the Altmetric score (a single-number summary of the attention an article has received online) and the Altmetric bookmarklet (a browser widget that allows you to look up altmetrics for any journal article or ArXiv.org preprint with a unique identifier). Sources tracked for mentions of articles include social and traditional media outlets from around the world, post-publication peer-review sites, reference managers like Mendeley, and public policy documents.

Librarians can get free access to the Altmetric Explorer and free services for institutional repositories. You can also request trial access to Altmetric for Institutions.

3. Integrate altmetrics into library outreach and education

Librarians are often asked to describe Open Access publishing choices to both faculty and students and teach how to gather evidence of impact for hiring, promotion, and tenure. These opportunities–whether one on one or in group settings like faculty meetings–can allow librarians to introduce altmetrics.

Discussing altmetrics in the context of Open Access publishing helps “sell” the benefits of OA. Altmetrics, like download counts that appear in PLOS journals and institutional repositories, can highlight the benefits of open access publishing. They can also demonstrate that “impact” is more closely tied to an individual’s scholarship rather than a journal’s impact factor.

Similarly, researchers often use an author’s h-index for hiring, tenure, and promotion, conflating the h-index with the quality of an individual’s work. Librarians are often asked to teach and provide assistance calculating an h-index within various databases (Web of Science, SCOPUS, etc.). Integrating altmetrics into these instruction sessions is akin to providing researchers with additional primary resource choices on a research project. Librarians need to make researchers aware of many tools they can use to evaluate the impact of scholarship, and of the relevant research–including benefits of and drawbacks to different altmetrics.

So, what does altmetrics outreach look like on the ground? To start, check out these great presentations that librarians around the world have given on the benefits of using altmetrics (and particular altmetrics tools) in research and promotion.

Another great way to stay relevant on this subject is to find and recommend to your grad students and faculty readings on ways they can use altmetrics in their career, like this one from our blog on the benefits of including altmetrics on your CV.

4. Discover the benefits that altmetrics offer librarians

There are reasons to learn about altmetrics beyond serving faculty and students. A major one is that many librarians are scholars themselves, and can use altmetrics to better understand the diverse impact of their articles, presentations, and white papers. Consider putting altmetrics on your own CV, and advocating the use of altmetrics among library faculty who are assembling tenure and promotion packages.

Librarians also produce and support terabytes’ worth of scholarly content that’s intended for others’ use, usually in the form of digital special collections and institutional repository holdings. Altmetrics can help librarians understand the impacts of these non-traditional scholarly outputs, and provide hard evidence of their use beyond ‘hits’ and downloads–evidence that’s especially useful when making arguments for increased budgetary and administrative support.

It’s important that librarians explore the unique ways they can apply altmetrics to their own research and jobs, especially in light of recent initiatives to create recommended practices for the collection and use of altmetrics. What is useful to a computational biologist may not be useful for a librarian (and vice versa). Get to know the research and tools and figure out ways to use them to your own ends.

There’s a lot happening right now in the altmetrics space, and it can sometimes be overwhelming for librarians to keep up with and understand. By following the steps outlined above, you’ll be well positioned to inform and support researchers, administrators, and library decision makers in their use. And in doing so, you’ll be indispensable in this new era of web-native research.

Are you a librarian that’s using altmetrics? Share your experiences in the comments below!

This post has been adapted from the 2013 C&RL News article, “Riding the crest of the altmetrics wave: How librarians can help prepare faculty for the next generation of research impact metrics” by Lapinski, Piwowar, and Priem.

If you don’t include altmetrics on your CV, you’re missing out in a big way.

There are many benefits to scholars and scholarship when altmetrics are embedded in a CV.

Altmetrics can:

1. provide additional information;
2. de-emphasize inappropriate metrics;
3. uncover the impact of just-published work;
4. legitimize all types of scholarly products;
5. recognize diverse impact flavors;
6. reward effective efforts to facilitate reuse;
7. encourage a focus on public engagement;
8. facilitate qualitative exploration;
9. empower publication choice; and
10. spur innovation in research evaluation.

In this post, we’ll detail why these benefits are important to your career, and also recommend the ways you should–and shouldn’t–include altmetrics in your CV.

1. Altmetrics provide additional information

The most obvious benefit of including altmetrics on a CV is that you’re providing more information than your CV’s readers already have.  Readers can still assess the CV items just as they’ve always done: based on title, journal and author list, and maybe–if they’re motivated–by reading or reviewing the research product itself. Altmetrics have the added benefit of allowing readers to dig into post-publication impact of your work.

2. Altmetrics de-emphasize inappropriate metrics

It’s generally regarded as poor form to evaluate an article based on a journal title or impact factor. Why? Because high journal impact factors vary across fields and an article often receives more or less attention than its journal container suggests.

But what else are readers of a CV to do? Most of us don’t have enough domain expertise to dig into each item and assess its merits based on a careful reading, even if we did have time. We need help, but traditional CVs don’t provide enough information to assess the work on anything but journal title.

Providing article-level citations and altmetrics in a CV gives readers more information, thereby de-emphasizing evaluation based on journal rank.

3. Altmetrics uncover the impact of just-published work

Why not suggest that we include citation counts in CVs, and leave it at that? Why go so far as altmetrics? The reason is that altmetrics have benefits that complement the weaknesses of a citation-based solution.

Timeliness is the most obvious benefits of altmetrics. Citations take years to accrue, which can be a problem for graduate students who are applying for jobs soon after publishing their first papers and for those promotion candidates whose most profound work is published only shortly before review.

Multiple research studies have found that counts of downloads, bookmarks and tweets correlate with citations, yet accrue much more quickly, often in weeks or months rather than years. Using timely metrics allows researchers to showcase the impact of their most recent work.

4. Altmetrics legitimize all types of scholarly products

How can readers of a CV know if your included dataset, software project, or technical report is any good?

You can’t judge its quality and impact based on the reputation of the journal that published it, since datasets and software aren’t published in journals. And even if they were, we wouldn’t want to promote the poor practice of judging the impact of an item by the impact of its container.

How, then, can alternative scholarly products be more than just space-filler on a CV?

The answer is product-level metrics. Like article-level metrics do for journal articles, product-level metrics provide the needed evidence to convince evaluators that a dataset or software package or white paper has made a difference. These types of products often make impacts in ways that aren’t captured by standard attribution mechanisms like citations. Altmetrics are key to communicating the full picture of how a product has influenced a field.

5. Altmetrics recognize diverse impact flavors

The impact of a research paper has a flavor. There are scholarly flavors (a great methods sections bookmarked for later reference or controversial claims that change a field), public flavors (“sexy” research that captures the imagination or data from a paper that’s used in the classroom), and flavors that fall into the area in between (research that informs public policy or a paper that’s widely used in clinical practice).

We don’t yet know how many flavors of impact there are, but it would be a safe bet that scholarship and society need them all. The goal isn’t to compare flavors: one flavor isn’t objectively better than another. They each have to be appreciated on their own merits for the needs they meet.

To appreciate the impact flavor of items on a CV, we need to be able to tell the flavors apart. (Citations alone can’t fully inform what kind of difference a research paper has made on the world. They are important, but not enough.) This is where altmetrics come in. By analyzing patterns in what people are reading, bookmarking, sharing, discussing and citing online we can start to figure out what kind – what flavor – of impact a research output is making.

More research is needed to understand the flavor palette, how to classify impact flavor and what it means. In the meantime, exposing raw information about downloads, shares, bookmarks and the like starts to give a peek into impact flavor beyond just citations.

6. Altmetrics reward efforts to facilitate reuse

Reusing research – for replication, follow-up studies and entirely new purposes – reduces waste and spurs innovation. But it does take a bit of work to make your research reusable, and that work should be recognized using altmetrics.

There are a number of ways authors can make their research easier to reuse. They can make article text available for free with broad reuse rights. They can choose to publish in places with liberal text-mining policies, that invest in disseminating machine-friendly versions of articles and figures.

Authors can write detailed descriptions of their methods, materials, datasets and software and make them openly available for reuse. They can even go further, experimenting with executable papers, versioned papers, open peer review, semantic markup and so on.

When these additional steps result in increased reuse, it will likely be reflected in downloads, bookmarks, discussions and possibly citations. Including altmetrics in CVs will reward investigators who have invested their time to make their research reusable, and will encourage others to do so in the future.

7. Altmetrics can encourage a focus on public engagement

The research community, as well as society as a whole, benefits when research results are discussed outside the Ivory Tower. Engaging the public is essential for future funding, recruitment and accountability.

Today, however, researchers have little incentive to engage in outreach or make their research accessible to the public. By highlighting evidence of public engagement like tweets, blog posts and mainstream media coverage, altmetrics on a CV can reward researchers who choose to invest in public engagement activities.

8. Altmetrics facilitate qualitative exploration

Including altmetrics in a CV isn’t all about the numbers! Just as we hope many people who skim our CVs will stop to read our papers and explore our software packages, so too we can hope that interested parties will click through to explore the details of altmetrics engagement for themselves.

Who is discussing an article? What are they saying? Who has bookmarked a dataset? What are they using it for? As we discuss at the end of this post, including provenance information is crucial for trustworthy altmetrics. It also provides great information that helps CV readers move beyond the numbers and jump into qualitative exploration of impact.

9. Altmetrics empower publication choice

Publishing in a new or innovative journal can be risky. Many authors are hesitant to publish their best work somewhere new or with a relatively-low impact factor. Altmetrics can remedy this by highlighting work based on its post-publication impact, rather than the title of the journal it was published in. Authors will be empowered to choose publication venues they feel are most appropriate, leveling the playing field for what might otherwise be considered risky choices.

Successful publishing innovators will also benefit. New journals won’t have to wait two years to get an impact factor before they can compete. Publishing venues that increase access and reuse will be particularly attractive. This change will spur innovation and support the many publishing options that have recently debuted, such as eLife, PeerJ, F1000 Research and others.

10. Altmetrics spur innovation in research evaluation

Finally, including altmetrics on CVs will engage researchers directly in research evaluation. Researchers are evaluated all the time, but often behind closed doors, using data and tools they don’t have access to. Encouraging researchers to tell their own impact stories on their CVs, using broad sources of data, will help spur a much-needed conversation about how research evaluation is done and should be done in the future.

OK, so how can you do it right?

There can be risks to including altmetrics data on a CV, particularly if the data is presented or interpreted without due care or common sense.

Altmetrics data should be presented in a way that is accurate, auditable and meaningful:

• Accurate data is up-to-date, well-described and has been filtered to remove attempts at deceitful gaming
• Auditable data implies completely open and transparent calculation formulas for aggregation, navigable links to original sources and access by anyone without a subscription.
• Meaningful data needs context and reference. Categorizing online activity into an engagement framework helps readers understand the metrics without becoming overwhelmed. Reference is also crucial. How many tweets is a lot? What percentage of papers are cited in Wikipedia? Representing raw counts as statistically rigorous percentiles, localized to domain or type of product, makes it easy to interpret the data responsibly.

Assuming these presentation requirements are met, how should the data be interpreted? We strongly recommend that altmetrics be considered not as a replacement for careful expert evaluation but as a supplement. Because they are still in their infancy, we should view altmetrics as way to ground subjective assessment in real data; a way to start conversations, not end them.

Given this approach, at least three varieties of interpretation are appropriate: signaling, highlighting and discovery. A CV with altmetrics clearly signals that a scholar is abreast of innovations in scholarly communication and serious about communicating the impact of scholarship in meaningful ways. Altmetrics can also be used to highlight research products that might otherwise go unnoticed: a highly downloaded dataset or a track record of F1000-reviewed papers suggests work worthy of a second look. Finally, as we described above, auditable altmetrics data can be used by evaluators as a jumping off point for discovery about who is interested in the research, what they are doing with it, and how they are using it.

How to Get Started

How can you add altmetrics to your own CV or, if you are a librarian, empower scholars to add altmetrics to theirs?

Start by experimenting with altmetrics for yourself. Play with the tools, explore and suggest improvements. Librarians can also spread the word on their campuses and beyond through writing, teaching and outreach. Finally, if you’re in a position to hire, promote, or review grant applications, explicitly welcome diverse evidence of impact when you solicit CVs.

What are your thoughts on using altmetrics on a CV? Would you welcome them as a reviewer, or choose to ignore them? Tell us in the comments section below.

This post has been adapted from “The Power of Altmetrics on a CV,” which appeared in the April/May 2013 issue of ASIS&T Bulletin.